by Tim Lebbon
Torture enough, but the voice that mocks him is worse.
“Fucking weak and fucking useless,” O’Peeria says. Somehow he can see her through the trees, sitting at the base of the Komadian tower and shaking her head as the beating continues. He’s not sure how he can see her, because the Strangers are throwing him around like two foxlions playing with a sheebok before the kill. And besides, he’s sure his eyes must be bruised shut, the skin and flesh around them weeping tears of blood. But still she’s there, armed in her full weaponry as if she has come to help.
She can’t help. She’s dead. Yet she stares at him as if he’s nothing, and he feels his body flipped around and dragged across the ground, and he cannot escape her gaze.
MALLOR AND THE others had been traveling all night, so they took time to eat, drink and rest. U’Nam and the ginger man had come from a village fifty miles to the north, and their machine had ground to a halt ten miles away, its internal gears and fluids seizing under the constant strain. No amount of cajoling or magical channeling could urge it onward, and they had left it in the shelter of a copse of trees. Pelly and the other man had come all the way from Pavisse, the mining town that gave the River Pav its name. It sat close to the source of the river, and Namior had heard many tales of the great machines run by the miners; digging things, swimming constructs, and machines that reached miles underground to bring mined goods to the surface. They had traveled by boat, leaving it moored down on the river when they’d come into contact with Mallor. The four did not seem overly familiar with each other, and Namior wondered whether they only met when pursuing or killing a Stranger.
And there was Mallor himself, the Core’s western general, tending his machine and sending gentle whispers of magic into its internal workings. He revealed no origin and told Namior only that he had ridden across the plains. She imagined him wandering Noreela’s western extremes, waiting, watching, bringing Core to him if a Stranger was tracked, living on his own in the wilds during those times when they sensed nothing of threat from beyond the land. A forlorn existence, but one she suspected he had lived for years. He seemed uncomfortable in company, preferring to sit beside his machine and share its magical drive.
They ate and drank in silence, Namior feeling suspicious glances thrown her way. The sound of the insect sizzling and spitting came back to her, and she shivered in dawn’s growing warmth. My blood did that. But her blood had also saved her, when the Stranger had caught her and sampled it on the way out of Pavmouth Breaks. She hoped these Core understood how useful she could be.
When the silence grew uncomfortable, Namior asked about the signal that Kel had sent.
“A calling,” Pelly said. The woman seemed intense and severe, and Namior was still uneasy about her comments concerning Kel. “It’s something we’re all trained to listen for, but none of us hopes to hear.”
“What did it sound like?”
“Not as it should,” Mallor said. “The first one, at least.” He left the shadow of his machine and came to join the group. Even squatting down, he was almost as tall as Namior. “But the second was clear enough.”
“Not as it should?” U’Nam asked.
Mallor shrugged. “There was something… askew. None of you heard that? None of you sensed it?” Heads shook.
“Guess that’s why you’re the general, Mallor,” the ginger man said, and soft laughter fluttered around the group.
“He sent the first signal using their own magic,” Namior said. “I’m not sure how. But the land back there is silent.” She nodded behind her, back the way she had come, and for a beat Pavmouth Breaks existed in her mind as an unknown and unknowable place. The feeling soon evaporated, but it left her cold and afraid, with a hollow in her heart yearning to be filled.
“We’ve so much to learn,” U’Nam said. “These are great times.”
“Great?” Pelly said, almost a shout.
The Shantasi waved her hand. “You know what I mean. Important.”
“You want them to write songs about you, Shantasi?” Namior said, but she immediately regretted the comment. She shook her head and looked down at her hands.
“I need to send word to the Core still journeying here,” Mallor said, standing to go back to his machine.
“How many?” Namior asked.
“In the next day, perhaps a hundred.”
A thrill of hope rushed through her. A hundred! And all trained fighters, many of whom had experience killing Strangers. Maybe there’s hope yet! But then she thought of Kel, and wondered where he was and what was happening to him, and the hope dwindled to something negligible and unimportant.
“There’s a vulnerable spot in their armor,” she said, pointing at her throat. “Just here.”
“Armor?” U’Nam said. The Core glanced around at each other, confused, unnerved, and Namior’s hopes shrank some more as she realized she had plenty more to tell.
ONE OF THEM holds him down while another pours something into his mouth. It’s hot and insubstantial, like steam, but has a defined taste that he cannot place. Because I’ve never tasted anything like this before, he thinks. At least they have ceased beating him, for the moment.
“Oh, that’s right, just lie back and enjoy yourself,” O’Peeria says. She’s standing behind the Stranger leaning over him, poking toward the metal armor with a thick spike from her belt but never quite touching.
Then the stuff hits his stomach, and he wishes they were beating him again.
It burns, it melts, it seems to explode in a continuous, everlasting eruption through his flesh and bones, breaking his skin and bursting out in showers of meat and blood and gristle… and yet nothing about him changes, not on the outside. The Stranger continues to pour, and when Kel starts to cough and gag, the other one grabs his chin and forehead and holds his mouth open wider still.
O’Peeria is saying something to him, but her voice is lost in the buzz of pulsing blood thumping at his ears. She seems keen to tell him something, pointing and prodding at the air with the spike, and she’s just as beautiful as ever.
Kel glares at the Stranger close to his face, trying to see eyes behind the armor and hoping that he can appeal to him. But the soldiers are drones, simply doing what Keera Kashoomie tells them.
Still, no questions. Softening me up, he thinks.
Something flashes high overhead, and maybe it is in his eyes.
“What?” Keera says. He cannot see her. There’s confusion in her voice. And then fear. “What?”
Kel cannot see very much at all. He feels impacts on the ground as someone runs, then his eyes are spiked with a bright flash once more. The Strangers seem unmoved; they hit him again, kick him, scratch.
The pain is exquisite. But with O’Peeria staring over the Stranger’s shoulder, Kel no longer wishes himself dead.
NAMIOR LED THEM back to Pavmouth Breaks. Mallor had instructed the two men to remain behind and await the arrival of more Core, and to tell everything they knew about what had happened. He left the crystal with them, wrapped up in Kel’s jacket and hidden away beneath a gorse bush.
The two women came with them. The Shantasi moved with a grace and silence that Namior had never witnessed, and though U’Nam was brash and surly, Namior could not help but admire her. Pelly walked with purpose in each step, as if every moment of her life was spent seeking revenge for her terrible scarring.
Namior had come several miles inland, and the first part of their journey was comfortable. They picked berries and ate while walking, U’Nam moving fifty steps ahead to scout for dangers. Namior expected a continuing barrage of questions from Mallor and Pelly, but they walked mostly in silence, all lost in their own thoughts.
She was desperate to return. Her mother needed her, and Kel was still down there somewhere, prisoner of the Komadians. The chance of her rescuing them both seemed preposterous, but she had nothing else to hold on to, and events had driven her to utter desperation.
She had fled the village during the stormy night, but ret
urning in the calmer morning gave everything to view. As they mounted a small rise and heard the first faint sounds of the River Pav to the south of them, Namior gasped and fell to her knees.
Two of the tall, black towers were easily visible. The northernmost tower rose from the high, wooded cliff tops a mile from the village, the ground approximately at the same level as where they were. Its base was hidden by trees, and the tapering edge facing them was black in the morning sun. It curved to the south, toward where Pavmouth Breaks lay mostly hidden down in the river valley, looming over Namior’s home as if preparing to fall at any moment. South of the village, another tower rose on the opposite hillside. The tip of another was visible farther along the southern hillsides—the one she and Kel had seen on top of Drakeman’s Hill, Namior guessed—and she could also see the top of another one peering out of the river valley.
“What in the Black are they?” Pelly whispered.
“What I told you about. Their machines built them. We saw them on the island, too.”
“Something to do with their magic?” Mallor said. “Giant ground rods?”
“Their magic is nothing to do with Noreela,” Namior said, shaking her head. “I think they’re more likely the interrupters of our magic.”
U’Nam remained silent, taking everything in, trying to process what she could see. Her expression was severe, and she had strapped a small crossbow to her left arm.
“That’s the way I came out,” Namior said, pointing south toward the river. “I had to climb, but the valley sides are shallower this far inland.” She pointed west, toward the towering structure and the landscape between them and it. “That was where they took Kel. When he was captured the first time and put in the stockade, that must have been at the base of that thing there.” She nodded at the monolith half-hidden by the folds in the land. “The one up on the cliffs… I didn’t even know about that one. I doubt anyone does.”
“They surround the village,” U’Nam said. “All leaning in toward the valley. The whole village is down there?”
Namior nodded, trying to imagine everything she knew, and everything she had always known, hidden down there in a cleft in the land.
Mallor knelt and touched the ground, clasping a handful of heather and soil and closing his eyes. “This is still Noreela,” he said. “But there’s a shimmer even here.”
Namior did not need to use her ground rod to know what he meant. The language of the land was repulsed by that place, pulling back like someone drawing away from a fire.
“Shouldn’t we wait until dark?” Pelly asked.
A jagged slash of lightning arced across the valley, sparkling between towers for a beat before fading away. Namior caught her breath, then ground her teeth together. Something else beginning.
“No,” she said, sharper than she’d intended. “We can’t waste a beat.”
Mallor nodded his agreement. U’Nam said nothing. They went down into the valley.
THEY ALL FELT it when they passed within the influence of the towers. Magic pulled away, and it was a sickening sensation, leaving them bereft. Namior had lived that way for days, but she still cried out and put her hands to her face, trying to hold in the last echoes of magic dwindling in her mind. Even those soon fled, driven out by whatever the Komadians had done.
U’Nam produced a small, intricately etched metallic box from her pocket and concentrated, expecting it to do something it would not. Mallor knelt and clasped a handful of dirt, throwing it away and wiping his hand on his trousers as though it disgusted him. Pelly touched her scarred face.
“We’re there,” Namior said.
“We still have these.” Pelly drew her sword. A tear sparkled on the hard scar tissue of her left cheek and she did not wipe it away. Perhaps she could not feel it.
“It’s so wrong,” Mallor said.
“We still have faith in magic, even though it’s no longer there,” U’Nam said, pocketing the box. “That’s what makes us strong.” She drew her sword and looked at the others, pale face betraying nothing.
“We should move on,” Mallor said, staring at his hand. “We need to know the lay of the land, enemy strengths, concentrations of defenses. We’ll penetrate as far as we can without being seen; any threats, we fall back. This is just scouting. Understood?”
“Yes,” Pelly said.
U’Nam looked straight ahead.
“U’Nam?” Mallor said. “Understood?”
The Shantasi nodded.
“If enough Core arrive, we’ll attack at dusk.”
They descended the slope quickly and started following the course of the River Pav. When they passed by the ruined Dagenstine monk’s dwelling, Namior waved at them to slow down. Soon, the trail would lead to a path, and after that the first buildings. The river hushed by a couple of hundred steps to their left, timeless and unconcerned at the fate of people, places or lands.
“This is the start of my village,” she said.
Mallor nodded, and U’Nam took the lead.
Namior was impressed at their stealth. She’d heard tales of the Shantasi, and how they were possessed of unusual speed and a natural agility, but Mallor and Pelly also seemed to flow along the trail rather than walk. She felt clumsy in comparison, and she remained close to Mallor, expecting him to berate her noisiness at any moment.
She glanced up at the hillside to their right, wondering where Kel was, how he was, and whether she would ever see him again. Of course I will! She was angry at the direction her thoughts were taking. Maybe she should have guided the Core to the stockade from which Kel had already escaped once? But it seemed unlikely that they had taken him there a second time, especially after he’d murdered to escape.
Perhaps they’d just dragged him away and killed him.
Namior paused and closed her eyes, breathing deeply, listening to the sounds of the river. There was no magic about her senses, nothing tied in with the land; nothing but herself. And deep though her sense of doom had sunk, it still did not feel like a world in which Kel was no more.
Fingertips tapped her upper arm and her eyes snapped open. Mallor stood before her, eyebrows raised in a silent question.
Namior shook her head, and they went on.
The first home came into view, and the trail changed into a cobbled path. Soon they would be within the village’s embrace, and they would start to see people preparing for the day. Some would be heading down to the harbor to continue in their rescue efforts, while others would be taking children to their teachers, looking to trade or—
But there was nothing, and no one. And she soon realized the foolishness of her thoughts, because Pavmouth Breaks had changed forever. The air was gloomy, the atmosphere dark, and looking up she saw that the sky was overcast again, and the sun she had seen rise up on the plains seemed unlikely to touch that place.
Storm’s coming, she thought. She knew that the others would see little to suggest that, but she had lived there all her life. The direction of the clouds, the tang of sea on the air, the lazy quality of the light, all pointed to rough weather descending upon them soon. The last storm had brought them chaos; she hoped the next would be less harsh.
Mallor grabbed her arm and pulled her down. Namior looked for the other two, but they had melted away somewhere, finding hiding places where the path looked long, straight and clear.
Someone stepped from a doorway thirty steps along the path. It was a woman, her clothes grubby, hair awry, carrying a half-empty bottle of rotwine and mumbling to herself. Namior recognized Rhutha, the village drunk, who caused occasional problems at the Moon Temple and elsewhere. She was a worshipper of the old Sleeping Gods, one of only a few in the village, and most people treated her as an oddity who caused occasional annoyance.
Rhutha stumbled down the path toward the sea, swaying from side to side.
U’Nam emerged from behind a bush just across from them, and Namior was reminded of how the Core had manifested out of the mist, their magic-aided camouflage startling her into
thinking they were wraiths. There was no magic, but the Shantasi had still merged with the land.
U’Nam glanced across at Mallor, who shook his head.
And if he’d nodded? Namior thought. A quick blade across the throat for Rhutha?
Pelly rolled from atop a garden wall a dozen steps ahead, and when Rhutha stumbled out of sight they continued on their way.
EVEN THOUGH HE is sure that Keera Kashoomie has gone, still the Strangers beat him. Kel curses them, hates them, but he can do little about it. The flesh of his legs feels as if it has been melted from his bones, his insides are fluid, and he’s sure that blood is leaking from every orifice. The Strangers stand back as he flounders on the ground, and O’Peeria walks right between them and squats by his side.
Now that they’ve stopped pouring things into his mouth, he can hear her again.
“Feeling better?” she asks. She’s resting her forearms on her thighs, hands dangling down, and he tries to reach out and touch her fingers. But she’s not there. “Letting yourself get caught… really, you call yourself Core?”
“No,” he croaks, and blood or saliva rushes down his throat.
O’Peeria seems surprised for a moment, but then she smiles and laughs softly. “Not surprised, really,” she says. “But you’re missing so much.” She emphasizes the words and stares at him intently, glancing back at the Strangers without moving her head.
“What?” he says.
“Use your fucking eyes, Kel! Remember the Core training? It gave us… filters. We all see everything, but Core can sort it down to the useful, and everything else. Have you really been gone so long?”
“Thought so,” he says, looking past her at the metal-clad men. “Thought… I’d left it all behind.”
O’Peeria smiles sadly, and he realizes that he can see the approaching Stranger right through her face. She reaches out one hand and touches his cheek, and this time he feels it, little more than the kiss of a butterfly’s wing but still there, still wonderfully there. “But it’s all …” she begins, and he finishes for her.